Page 232 - Jindezhen Porcelain Production of the 19th C. by Ellen Huang, Univ. San Diego 2008

215

ideas for new types of designs, members of the “Eight Friends of Mt. Zhu” achieved

enough artistic renown to allow some of them to be hired by high-ranking officials and

political figures of the 1910s. When producing imperial porcelain for the Yuan Shikai

reign, Guo Baochang hired Wang Xiaotang (1885-1924) a painter based in Jingdezhen

and native of Jiangxi province, to decorate the Yuan Shikai porcelain ware. A Poyang,

Jiangxi native, Pan Taoyu (1887-1926) painted porcelain for Cao Kun, who was president

of China in the 1920s and an army general who was head of one of the factions stemming

60
from the breakdown of the Beiyang Army, the Zhili clique after 1919.

From the perspective of export porcelain, the nineteenth century was a period of

increasing numbers of Jingdezhen export objects. As statistics in the General Gazetteer

of Jiangxi Province (Jiangxi tongzhi gao) indicate, between 1860 and the outbreak of war

with Japan in the 1930s, the average annual quantity of porcelain exports from

61
Jingdezhen rose steadily.

Table 1. Average Annual Quantity of Export Porcelain from Jingdezhen, 1861-1935

Tongzhi (1861-1875) 839,050 kg
Guangxu (1875-1908) 1,523,350 kg
Xuantong (1909-1911) 2,978,800 kg
Republic (1912-1935 circa) 3,565,300 kg

The upward trend in export ware from Jingdezhen parallels an observation made in 1925

by Liu Zifen, a Cantonese poet and collector living in Shanghai. In his notes on porcelain,

Liu outlined the development of a new porcelain production process. The process,

according to Liu, started in the late-Qianlong period and increased through the early